


reintegration

by recryption



Category: Subnautica (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Muteness, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 14:48:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13719969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recryption/pseuds/recryption
Summary: a human has the very strange capability to survive despite the odds.(in other words: recovery is difficult, but he's forced to get through it-)





	reintegration

Alterra seizes upon him immediately -- first to get some sort of repayment for his trillion-credit debt, then realizing that they could use his experience on Planet 4546B as a way to get significant media attention. They use his credits as a way to keep him pinned down, of course; it would all be excused if his gathered information was downloaded into Alterra servers and he gave media interviews. After all, which mechanic survived a crash onto an aquatic alien planet? Which mechanic came back to tell the story?

The first media room is stuffed to the brim with too-many people that swarm him the moment he steps in, reporters immediately crowding him and asking him question after question after question, microphones are pushed to his mouth and face and the flash of cameras and recorders and phones blind him as he stands stock-still in that swirling whirlpool of people and stuttering recorders and, and, and-

_(crash survivor, they call him, always the crash survivor -- he doesn’t think he hears his real name once in that fucking room. he’s the crash survivor. he lived, and that’s all there is to it-)_

And that first media day, he collapses to the ground and _screams_ because it was Too Loud and there were Too Many Faces and the reporters are shocked into sudden silence and all he wants to do is Get Out-

…

They find him a few hours later, locked in the bathroom, eyes red from crying and shaking in fear and a few Alterra employees look at him in pity like he is a hurt animal in need of rescue. “We should’ve expected this,” they say, their voices still too _loud_. “He’s spent too long alone. I don’t know what the higher-ups were thinking,” they say, clucking disapprovingly, and eventually they draw him out and lead him to a new apartment and tell him to report for therapy tomorrow afternoon.

\---

The Doctor is a pretty young _thing_ , with wire-frame glasses and a shock of blue hair and the first thing he’s struck by is how strange she looks -- how _all_ these humans look -- in comparison to the ripped photographs he had found abandoned on the Aurora and in the lifepods and how different she is from the funny alien fish that swam around him and kept him company in those lonely months.

He can’t speak -- rather, he refuses to. He had barely spoken any words the day before, merely signing the papers and getting escorted to the anxious media outlets by a pair of security guards, and now his brain doesn’t seem to be able to cooperate with his mouth and his throat is locked up tight like an old mansion’s iron gate. The Doctor merely hums and chews her pen thoughtfully and occasionally pauses to take down notes as he spells out words in halting sign language, referring to the chart of letters next to him.

She diagnoses him with “trauma-based selective mutism” and “post-traumatic stress disorder” and “chronic fatigue syndrome” next to a whole other list of various disorders and diseases and possible effects of being stranded on an alien planet that he doesn’t really process. He’s assigned pills and follow-up appointments and given the orders to return to normal life as quickly as possible, whatever “normal life” might be for him now.

The front-page article is a picture of him next to a short column about the Crash Survivor, and it makes his head hurt trying to reconcile the photograph with his new identity. The apartment that Alterra gifted him as he recovers and adjusts is white and sterile and all he owns is a suitcase of Alterra-issued standard clothing, his old, beat-up PDA, and a self-scanner machine that sparks when it thinks that nobody is looking at it.

\---

She shows up in his dreams -- Her glowing eyes haunt him at every turn, and he feels the peculiar feeling of Her gaze on him whenever he’s alone, even though She was dead and gone and he was hundreds of thousands of lightyears away from that goddamn planet-

He remembers Her too well. She had sank to the ground when Her children hatched and left Her to die alone in that metal box She had guarded for hundreds of years. He was the only one left to watch Her. She was only a shade of the great Mother that She had been for so long, and briefly, it passed through his mind that She may have been glad to finally leave those steel confines, even if Her physical body was still trapped there; he wonders how She spent the time, with only rushing water and the crowds of senseless fish to keep Her company.

The lone Crash Survivor with no voice left in his lungs and the lone Kharaa experimentee with no life left in Hers had sat together on that sandy ground until Her eyes closed and the underwater pressure threatened to shatter his skull, until the breath itself was sucked out of his lungs and She was gone at last; and even then he remained sitting there, watching Her immense form relax at the end of it all, watching Her gorgeous claws sink deeply into the earth and stay still at last.

He couldn’t get Her out of his mind. He wonders if She was happy, in the end. He wonders if he had done enough. He wishes She was still there, guiding him, leading him _home_ -

_(but wasn’t he home, already? hadn’t She already sent him home? he remembers: a white dream as he was lifting off, Her voice a sweet memory pushing at his mind as he drifted between consciousness and the lack of it, but nothing more than that. he wonders if he’s really home or if he had merely fooled himself into believing it.)_

\---

People crawl all over themselves to visit Planet 4546B. They want to see his bases as proof of the evidence of the strange human tendency to survive. They want to see the ruins of the Degasi crew and the ancient, advanced Precursor technology and catch a rare glimpse at those horrible, four-pronged Reapers or see the gentle turn of a Ghost’s tail as it disappears into the aptly-named Dead Zone. Alterra is more than happy to oblige.

He fights so hard. He fights until his hands ache from signing to crowds and from typing articles and writing under pen names to get Alterra to _stop_ . His life on that planet was his _own_ . Those waters and the dead volcano he had slumbered in were _his_ . She and Her children were not _toys_ , to be passed around and gawked at by tourists without even the slightest _knowledge_ of what She had gone through to bring life back to that gorgeous ocean-

When he sees the announcement that Alterra plans to open tours, some part of his heart twists and his stomach hurts like he had been stabbed, or bitten, or torn apart from the inside out. Only a few are allowed to visit at a time. They would be allowed to look at the crater where the Aurora crashed and observe a merely performative moment of silence. They would look at all the things that the Crash Survivor built and left behind as evidence of the human tenacity, the human _will_ , to live. She would not be disturbed. Her resting body would remain untouched.

Nonetheless, he feels like some part of himself, some secret that he had kept to just _himself_ for so long, had been taken. It was his planet. It was _his_ planet. Nobody else had lived there for months, praying for help, losing their voice day by day and their drive to survive hour by hour. Nobody else was the Crash Survivor that they so diligently built him up to be. It was _his_ goddamn planet and Alterra was playing with it for _profit-_

The pretty young Doctor had gently rebuked him for furiously signing out protests to the agreement to her. She had told him that there really wasn't anything he could do, no matter how much he tried, because Alterra had done what they thought was best and it’d be difficult to change their decision, but he didn’t want to listen to any kind of reason or rationale.

He had stormed out of the office, on the verge of violent tears, walking home and sleeping for what felt like days and dreaming of Her voice and Her eyes and the way the moons rose over the broken hull of the Aurora. The Doctor was Alterra-appointed. Of course she was.

\---

Sometimes he thinks about the other people on his ship.

There was a pretty lady, he thinks, one with long brown hair and gorgeous brown eyes and he _swears_ that he can remember her voice but there’s nothing except for vague blurs in his head (and sometimes he thinks that he’s just making her up, because there are only disjointed features that he can never consolidate into a real face). He cannot remember any of the nice men that he had bunked with, and looking through old Alterra logs and recordings don’t help, either; there are only generic voices and generic names with nothing attached to them besides blurry faces and half-lucid conversations.

Sometimes he remembers the picture that he found, the _only_ intact picture that he had found, that had been laminated and taped securely to the inside of one of the ship’s lockers. The girl had looked nice. He never took the picture with him, and sometimes he wakes up regretting it. Surely her family would’ve wanted to see a picture of their girl again. Or maybe they would’ve yelled at him, asking why _he_ was the Crash Survivor and not their girl while he stood helplessly on their porch.

Whenever he thinks about it, though, he can’t imagine any scenario where he yells back or leaves or acts _normally_ . He usually just stands at the door and takes the beating. Sometimes, in his dreams, the family cries when they see the photograph and call the lady’s siblings over to see their sister one last time. Sometimes they invite him in for a talk and let him pour his heart out in half-stuttering words and half-stuttering sign language about what _happened_ on that planet. Sometimes the girl in the picture opens the door. Sometimes she opens the door and instead of human eyes, she has Her eyes.

He doesn’t bother to look through the downloaded data logs, anymore, instead letting his own mind spawn stories and speculate obsessively over the dead. His old PDA is in the back of his closet, buried under his new clothes and half-thoughtful gifts from fans inspired by his story, and sometimes he imagines (or is it real?) a dim blue glow emanating from the crack under his closet in the middle of the night even though he’s sure that he shut down his PDA weeks ago.

\---

When Alterra finally notices the notes he made about the Kharaa Bacterium, they order him in for testing and he has no choice but to sullenly walk into the scientists’ lab and wait for his blood to be drawn and skin samples to be taken as the doctors prod at him and wonder at the immense capabilities of the Kharaa.

The bacteria’s symptoms are mostly gone from him, now, but the residue remaining in his body is considered a medical marvel -- a rapidly-evolving infectious agent that corrupts genetic material and represses the immune system to quickly take over a host. They look at him in equal parts disgust and fascination, look at the scars that the Kharaa pustules left on his hands and arms and neck, ask him how he survived and how he pushed through the despair of inevitable death even though every time he took off his gloves he could _see_ how the infection was killing him.

He shrugs tiredly, because he had been asked so many times and he didn’t _know_. The scientists tell him that his genes were incurably corrupted but he was still alive and, in many ways, stronger from it. A medical miracle. Something to take apart and study and learn from. He signs that he’s glad he can help, but really it was Her who had fixed him and they should be looking at Her cure instead-

The doctors look at him quizzically and ask who She is and he’s indignantly explaining how Her voice and Her instructions had saved his life but then he realizes that they’re looking at him like he’s a particularly interesting rat and he drops his hands.

Pretty young Doctor signs him a new prescription the next appointment they have together. He looks up the medication when he gets home, finds that it’s for helping with delusions and the symptoms of psychosis, and subsequently tears up the Doctor’s orders.

\---

When he’s not dreaming about Her, he’s dreaming about the planet -- he’ll wake up with water in his lungs, the too-familiar ache of pressure crushing his skull, and he’ll have to stay awake until he stops gasping for the air that’s already there and the headache subsides and his heart stops pounding like he is still 800 meters below the surface of the ocean and choking as he frantically grasps for the hatch of his PRAWN suit.

He knows, of course, that he’s at _home_ \-- such a funny word, to him, because home was supposed to be where the heart was but every waking moment that he’s not writing interviews for the press or looking for a job that will hire him despite his reputation as the mute Crash Survivor or talking to the Doctor, he is thinking about that goddamn planet. He is thinking about the planet that drowned him hundreds of times over and of Her glowing eyes and he is living in half-vivid hallucinations of those huge beasts in the deep and of the pale white blood kelp reaching desperately for the surface of the ocean.

And maybe what he thought was home had _changed_ despite what Alterra told him about it being on _Earth_ because he never felt as comfortable sitting on the roof of his apartment complex as he felt sitting on the top of his Lifepod 5, watching the sun rise over the watery horizon as it lit up the forever-burning Aurora, thinking that it was incredible that something so broken could still be so _beautiful_.

 _(and of course, following that train of thought, he’ll inevitably briefly wonder if_ he _could be beautiful too. he'll wonder if he would be beautiful if he was washed out in the rays of a golden sun, beautiful despite his voice broken from trauma and disuse and the scars on his hands that still sting and glow with green when they think that he’s not looking, beautiful despite it all-_

_until the morning ends and alterra calls, on time as always, and he is jolted out of his reverie of beautiful-beautiful-beautiful-)_

\---

In the end, Alterra re-employs him, whether it be due to his reputation or simply out of pure pity. He’s hired as a pre-flight mechanic, checking systems before ships launch, and he wonders how he could ever hold the lives of people in his hands when he had been diagnosed as a dangerous, mute lunatic.

One time, a child walks up to him with a bright look in his eyes and a smile on his face -- a first-grader, probably, who was going on an interplanetary trip and had gotten lost from his family. The kid’s wearing a bright red shirt and khakis and looks around at the half-built ships with a strange sense of wonder and awe that the Crash Survivor only wishes he could feel again.

“I saw you on TV,” the kid says, excitedly, tugging on his sleeve. He smiles awkwardly, trying his best not to pull away even though every _atom_ of him needs to _get out_ , and shakes his head. _Not me_ , he mouths. The kid doesn’t know, and the kid doesn’t _need_ to know.

He leads the kid to customer service and leaves him there, trying to wipe the feeling of the kid’s sticky hands off of his sleeve. He wonders how far his reputation has spread, if a first-grader had recognized him. It’s sickening to imagine how many children _idolize_ him, how many want to _be_ like him, want to _be_ abandoned on a treacherous planet with nothing but the human tendency to fight and survive.

Something in him revels at the thought of being known as a _hero_ , but god, if it doesn’t hurt to imagine children in his place, the boy as a planet's future Crash Survivor.

\---

He remembers that he put his hand on the Ghost Leviathan’s egg, once -- the thin membrane felt like it would give in under his light touch, the glowing blue embryos seemingly staring at him accusingly as they waited to hatch. He wondered how long they’d been waiting. He wondered if their parents were dead or simply wandering the Dead Zone, waiting for their children to emerge from the Lost River under the ideal conditions that would never pass, not with the Kharaa around.

It was too beautiful to be real. The rays circled him without fear, having never seen something quite Like Him before, while his hand caressed the giant egg under him and the oxygen drained out of his oxygen tanks. The Lost River was poisonous, but in this place, under the bioluminescence of the cove tree and the watchful gaze of those glowing children, it felt safe. He felt safe. He felt safer than he ever had been before, trapped first on Earth and yearning for the stars and second on that cramped ship day after day and it hits him that he might be _thankful_ that the ship crashed and showed him what _home_ really was.

The sterile white lights in his apartment don’t feel like _home_ yet but the sunrise still glows warmly over the horizon in the mornings and now, sitting awake in bed, he realizes that Earth was where She wanted him to be. This was where She thought he belonged.

\---

The pretty young thing of a Doctor tells him that she wants him to start talking again. Speech therapy, she calls it. A return to normalcy. A return to what it was like before Planet 4546B. A few words a day, a few sentences a week, nothing more than that. Recorded diary entries, if he had to, but just _something_ to help him adjust because it had been so long on Earth and it didn’t seem like he had any more drive to speak than he did months ago-

What she said shocks him, for a minute, but he keeps quiet. He notices, finally, that the Doctor’s blue hair dye is fading and her roots are growing out. He had been on Earth for months, now. Almost as long as he had lived in that ocean. The Doctor looks less like a pretty young thing and more like any other doctor, any other girl that could’ve been on the Aurora.

That night, he listens to the dim blue glow underneath his closet and picks up his PDA to finally charge it after months of inactivity. He looks up old Alterra logs, looks at the long list of people who weren’t Crash Survivors, and tries to find that girl in the photograph.

\---

It haunts him sometimes that he killed the members of the Sunbeam.

There were only six people, of course, compared to the dozens on the Aurora that had been killed and absorbed into Planet 4546B’s ecosystem, but he still thinks about it. He wonders if they had families, friends, that were missing them. He wonders if any of them were good people. He wonders if he could’ve deactivated the platform, if they would’ve helped him then and he would’ve left before he found Her, before he saved that glistening ocean, before his heart and veins ran wild with Kharaa and its aftereffects.

They had come to save him, and he had doomed them, and he stays awake staring at the ceiling in the dark, seeing his closet glow blue out of the corner of his eye, thinking about it. The explosion had been so gorgeously terrible, the ship a supernova against the pale blue sky. Avery Quinn and his crew must’ve been instantaneously vaporized. Nuclear shadows among the stars.

The Sunbeam had wanted so desperately to save him, save the rest of the survivors that they _thought_ existed, they had wanted to bring everyone _home_. They must’ve seen something good on the polluted blue-green surface of Earth that he was somehow blind to. There had to have been something on this fucking planet they thought was worth fighting for besides Alterra and their press conferences.

Avery Quinn had his crew and his family and his friends on Earth and the Crash Survivor has nothing but his memories but if they were willing to sacrifice themselves to bring him to what they thought was _home_ then he damn well had to make the most of that chance.

\---

 _I’m looking for Alice Yang’s family,_ he writes painstakingly, in messy, chicken-scratch letters. He winces at the sight of his own penmanship. He hadn’t needed to write for months, and now the lack of practice was catching up with him.

Her name was Alice Yang, he had found out. She had long brown hair and gorgeous brown eyes and the photograph her family had published upon hearing about the crash of the Aurora was the same photograph that had been taped up in that locker and the moment he saw it he felt like lightning had hit him and he was just struggling through the aftermath of it all.

He thinks that She would be proud of him -- Her sixth child, the one that had stayed with Her until Her eyes closed and Her heart stopped beating. She had given him back the key to life and the Sunbeam had given him the will to use it.

The human has a very strange will to not just survive, but to thrive.

\---

Doctor seems happy that he’s branching out, and she gives him the Yang’s address and phone number and convinces him to say a few basic words in her office and presence that afternoon, as practice. They were just basic greetings like “hello” and “goodbye”, but the words hurt his throat and give him so much anxiety to say that it feels like his heart might burst. The good Doctor looks so happy, though, that he manages to fake a smile through it all.

It comes to him that the Doctor might’ve been Alterra-appointed, but she wanted the best for him. As any Doctor would. She was trying to help him accept Earth as his home. She was trying and he had been pushing back because _god_ , if he couldn’t stop thinking about that planet and of Her and of the way Alterra had so casually used it as a _commodity_ -

He watches the sunbeams cross the pale, early sky every morning, those pearly rays washing over his face like he is being baptized in an ocean of holy water, and remembers how he got home.

\---

He’s dreaming of the tides and the ocean and of the burning husk of the Aurora breaching the waves like some sort of slumbering, metal beast, waiting for the perfect conditions to awaken.

A warper is perched on the edge of his lifepod, while he sits motionless on the top of it. The monster’s metal claws rest dangerously close to his hands, but he is not afraid. Not anymore. Not under Her protection.

As he watches, the warper falls apart -- its dirty purple exoskeleton comes off in shards, the transparent membrane around its ribcage peels off, its metal bones crumple like aluminum foil, until the being finally exposes its steadily beating heart. He carefully reaches down to take it in his hand. It beats, slowly but surely, a constant rhythm that echoes through his bones and pounds in his own chest.

The lone Crash Survivor with the voice creeping back into his lungs and the lone Precursor creation sit under the bleached sky together as the sun rises. The warper’s eyes dim, and its claws lose their grip on the lifepod’s edge. The creature seems to sigh, watching him with a strange, dull intensity, before it sinks into the deep water below him and disappears and leaves its core in a human’s hands.

The foreign heart slowly, so slowly, stops beating, and he misses that familiar pulse for a few seconds but the same beat is heavy in his own chest and he wonders how he could ever have forgotten about it. The two moons of Planet 4546B rise slowly and in sync over the glossy horizon and Her eyes glow from underneath the water and all he can hear is his own heartbeat pounding steadily onwards.

\---

His hands are shaking as he dials the number the Doctor had given him. His fingers are cold and the blood is rushing too harshly through his own ears for him to hear the persistent, buzzing waiting tone but he strengthens his nerves and clenches his hand hard around his phone in an effort to make it stop trembling.

The other side picks up, and it is loud in the background -- the person on the phone laughs at something someone else said previously, and there is the distinct clattering of pots and pans and a steaming kettle whistling from somewhere far away. He looks down at the ripped shreds of paper in his free hand, the blue notes he had left for himself almost too messy to understand, but he has them memorized at this point.

“Hey, I’m Lyra Yang,” the girl on the other side says. “Who is this?”

He takes a deep, shuddering breath.

“H-Hello,” he stutters. “I’m- the Crash Survivor.”

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in like two days because i watched the subnautica ending and the death of the sea emperor leviathan and got really sad and ended up writing this and putting WAY too much of myself into it. i hope yall enjoyed reading -- thinking about how the crash survivor must've dealt with his time alone and with all his dead crew members is really interesting to me.


End file.
